By Christine Rosen
Thursday, April 22, 2021
Silence is violence but criticism is trauma: This is the
new dispensation among the journalistic elite. Consider the case of Felicia
Sonmez, now a reporter for the Washington Post. Sonmez became
a well-known journalist-advocate for the MeToo movement a few years ago when
she decided to destroy the reputation of a fellow male journalist, Jonathan
Kaiman, who was then the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. She
and Kaiman had engaged in what both initially described as a mutual, drunken
hook-up. According to a thorough investigation by Emily Yoffe at Reason,
after hearing that another woman had complained about Kaiman to his employer,
Sonmez decided that she too had been victimized and wrote “a lengthy letter
accusing Kaiman of sexually violating her” and asked “that this letter be
publicly circulated,” with the obvious intention of destroying his
reputation—which, in short order, it did.
Sonmez, meanwhile, was hired by the Washington
Post, where she covered national politics. Last year, as news broke that
basketball star Kobe Bryant had died in a helicopter crash, Sonmez tweeted an
old story about the time Bryant had been accused of sexual assault. Her boss, Martin
Baron, emailed her to say what any reasonable adult (and boss) might have: “A
real lack of judgment to tweet this. Please stop. You’re hurting this
institution by doing this.” Sonmez was briefly placed on leave for violating
her employer’s social-media policy.
That might have been the end of it, but she decided to
share with the world the “trauma” the experience caused. In lengthy Twitter
threads, she described details of conversations with her therapists, bouts of
“vacant staring,” and the supposed “harms” the newspaper’s treatment of her had
caused. After her tweets spread among media Twitter, the Post caved
and rescinded its ban on Sonmez covering sexual-assault stories. She was not
placated: “This is good news, but it’s unfortunate that it had to come at such
a high emotional toll, and after my distress was dismissed for years. I’m
taking time to rest and process,” she tweeted. The Washington Post’s
union said the “decision came only after much public criticism and at the expense
of Felicia’s mental health. The Post must do better.”
Sonmez is not alone. Many of her fellow female
journalists at elite media institutions have learned that weaponizing their
fragility, claiming trauma, and emotionally blackmailing their employers yields
professional benefits.
Journalists used to understand the difference between
real trauma (dodging bullets in a war zone while on assignment, for example)
and manufactured trauma (reading an op-ed you disagree with from the comfort
and safety of a newsroom). Today, journalists at legacy media institutions such
as the Washington Post, the New York Times,
and Vanity Fair regularly behave as if a difference of opinion
on transgender issues or the usefulness of National Guard troops to quell riots
is akin to a physical assault that literally puts them in danger (as Times staffers
claimed last summer about an opinion piece written by Senator Tom Cotton).
Journalists who eagerly denounce “white fragility” in
others seem happy to wield their own fragile emotional states as weapons
against their employers. Those same institutions are encouraging this behavior
by rewarding it. Times reporter Taylor Lorenz loudly and
publicly complained after Fox News host Tucker Carlson criticized her on-air.
Like the obeisance demanded by Donald Trump at a cabinet meeting, Lorenz, with
her tantrum, prompted sycophantic tweets from her Times colleagues
offering their support and an official statement from the Times condemning
Carlson for his “calculating and cruel” remarks, calling them
“harassment.” Vanity Fair published a sympathetic story about
the “next-level harassment” experienced by female journalists. An
anonymous New York Times staffer complained that failing to
defend her colleagues who are upset “ignores the emotional toll that it takes
on reporters.”
Even the UN has gotten involved! On International Women’s
Day, UNESCO took the time not to defend the women whose lives are daily
imperiled by violence, disease, and war worldwide, but to announce a call “to
end online violence against women journalists.” A (male!) UNESCO spokesman told
everyone to use the hashtag #JournalistsToo to raise awareness.
These reporters’ use of phrases such as “online violence”
and their invocation of “trauma” when discussing mean tweets capitalizes on the
natural sympathy people feel for victims of real trauma and violence and turns
it to the journalists’ own professional advantage. It’s a good trick, because
it’s difficult to criticize these journalists without being oneself accused of
compounding the claimed injury.
The writer Michael Tracey described the deployment of
what he calls “therapeutic trauma jargon” in a recent issue of his Substack newsletter:
“Obviously, this harm cannot be externally adjudicated because one’s harm must
never be subject to contestation or (god forbid) falsification. So the logic
goes, every person has the right to say they are harmed without ever having the
legitimacy of that harm questioned, because to question the harm compounds the
harm.”
This was evident in Sonmez’s case. When the Post placed
her on leave, the union responded by writing, “Felicia herself is a survivor of
assault who bravely came forward with her story two years ago.” It further
criticized the Post for showing an “utter disregard for best
practices in supporting survivors of sexual violence.” Indeed, the only
evidence we have that Sonmez was assaulted is her claim that she was—a claim
vigorously denied by the person she accused and that was never adjudicated by a
court of law or subjected to any degree of serious scrutiny.
During one of many Black Lives Matter protests in
Washington, D.C., last summer, a mob marched down the street, stopping at
restaurants along the way to harass diners sitting outside. They surrounded the
diners’ tables, shouted “white silence is violence,” and insisted that the
restaurant patrons raise their fists in support. Most acquiesced, particularly
since the protestors were screaming in their faces.
One woman refused, however. Lauren Victor sat calmly
while the protestors screamed and yelled inches from her face, accusing her of
enjoying “white privilege.” Washington Post reporter Fredrick
Kunkle noted that most of the harassed diners “declined to comment afterward
about the confrontation.” But Victor, a woman who was berated and threatened
for refusing to raise her fist as the mob demanded, spoke with surprising
equanimity about the experience. “I wasn’t actually frightened,” she said.
Unlike the fragile emotional sensibilities of Times and Post reporters,
who have powerful institutions and unions to back them up when virtual mobs
descend, Victor faced down a real mob and just got on with it without wallowing
in victimhood.
But the rules of engagement are different for journalists
than for the hoi polloi, evidently. Many journalists now believe that they
should control the degree and quality of the criticism that their work
receives, even as they themselves feel no compunction about dishing out
rebukes. Of course, if they are calling out “white privilege,” or alleged
sexual harassment, or even, as the Post did, publicly shaming
a private citizen who once wore a politically incorrect Halloween costume (and
who was later fired from her job after the Post ran the
story), then these journalists are all too happy to join the mob’s demands for
“justice.”
But when a journalist from a powerful media organization
receives such criticism? Circle the wagons and demand the suppression of the speech
of the offenders. It’s a wonderfully effective recipe for soft authoritarianism
and groupthink; it’s a disaster for journalism.
No comments:
Post a Comment